boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome

Boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome skin#
Boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome trial#
Boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome series#

1: Benedetto da Maiano, Monument to Giotto, Florence Cathedral, 1490 / Scala, Art Resource, NYĮarly Italian painting was achieving venerable status in Florence in the later fifteenth century. The represented saint, or the altarpiece it came from, may have had some significance to the youth who holds it in Botticelli’s portrait, or to his family. Although the figure’s face, clothing, and pose are strongly based on Byzantine models, it is an Italian painting not much more than a century older than its host, probably a work of the Sienese painter Bartolomeo Bulgarini, who also worked in Florence. The painting of the saint is a piece of gold-ground panel painting that has been physically inserted into an excavated cavity in the panel. The figure inside the roundel offers a counterpoint to the modern youth: while the body of the young man turns to one side as his gaze meets ours, the saint faces us but looks upward and towards the light. Inside the roundel’s molded frame is a gold-ground painting of a blessing saint. In the world of this portrait, a pause in the conversation is a condition of being.Īll portraits that show a sitter looking out at the viewer engage an implicit conversation, but in Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Roundel the sitter presents the viewer with a conversation piece, a round image somewhat formally presented by the youth in order for us to see it. The various elements of the face are poised, yet not quite settled into composure-a quality of youth and also perhaps more broadly an index of the electric cultural world that has produced this youth, a world to an unusual degree marked by brilliant young men flinting each other into mutual definition. The slightly raised right eyebrow confirms the bid for our attention even as it evinces confidence in his privilege.

Like a buck, he fixes us with a calm but alert gaze, his posture balanced perfectly between reserve and appeal.

A pillow of golden hair sets off the youth’s fair but rosy face against the flat pale blue sky. His purplish-grey doublet and his green-grey eyes bring to life the hues of grey that surround him.

Boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome series#

The angled surfaces turn the greenish-grey stone into a series of contrasting stripes-light grey, dark grey, almost black-that isolate the youth inside multiple frames, like a jewel in a box. Urned towards the light, the young man is set against a crisp window embrasure made out of pietra serena, a local stone widely used in Florentine buildings.

Boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome trial#

The boy, looking at us with a puzzled look, his grey eyes and his red mouth half-open, is a psychological portrait of a village boy about to enter the trial of adolescence.Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel The “Boy with Suspenders” reveals a great artist of assured technique, luscious colour and great sensitivity. The striped cloth on the table in the background is in cooler tones. It is in a similar palette that Papaloukas paints the boy’s exquisite striped shirt.

Boy with suspenders holding book plaster wall art from rome skin#

Face and skin colours are part of the Byzantine palette: ochre, raw and burnt sienna. In this painting, Byzantine iconography and mosaic meet Cezanne’s teaching (1839-1906). The painter builds the boy’s portrait in clear shapes, painting each form in the appropriate colour in order to achieve an effect of volume. Here, Papaloukas confirms the axiom that one must approach tradition through the precepts of modern art. The “Boy with Suspenders” was painted in Mytilene but takes into consideration the lesson in Byzantine iconography that Papaloukas received during his visit to Mount Athos.